Maybe Mel’s glad Europeans finally showed up and brought in enough diseases to wipe out 90% of the Mayan population in just a few years. If the movie’s saying anything at all, it’s a hearty good-riddance to the sick, depraved Mayan culture. It feels completely authentic.Īpocalypto is first and foremost a chase movie, all the talk about it being an examination of what caused the downfall of the Mayan civilization is mostly smoke and mirrors.
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The result is a movie that plays like the best National Geographic special you’ve ever seen. Mel shoots it with the latest in digital camera technology, but rigs it in such a way that at times the movie looks like it was filmed on the fly by a struggling documentary crew.
He gets good performances, though it probably helps that you can’t understand what anyone is saying. The film also shuns experienced actors, in favor of people actually from the region and in some cases, directly descended from the Yucatans the movie is about. People hate reading subtitles, but to me this is infinitely preferable to watching some poor Hollywood actor attempt a halting approximation of what it might sound like if a Mayan Indian spoke English. Having his actors recite all of their dialogue in a dead language isn’t just a gimmick it’s another piece of the puzzle in making a completely accurate portrayal of ancient Mayan living. He’s put so much effort into accurately capturing the details of the period in which the movie is set, that it’s immersive. It’s a simple and sometimes repetitive story, but Gibson does a capable job of telling it. But it’s not long before Jaguar Paw escapes and the movie gets down to business as he races through the jungle pursued by Mayan hunting parties, in a desperate attempt to get back home and save his wife, whom he left hidden deep in an inescapable hole. Along the way we get a brief look at the slow rot eating up the Mayans: the people live in squalor, disease and famine are common, morality, if it ever existed, has been thrown out the window in favor of elevating the elite. There, they will be sacrificed to the Mayan sun god. That Indian is Jaguar Paw, a hunter from a village deep in the rainforest, captured by Mayan slavers and dragged across the countryside with his people to the heart of the Mayan civilization.
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